What is a classical education? Can you buy it in a box? Can you find a simple three step formula on how to teach your kids classically?
No.
Why not?
Because being educated classically is being educated to THINK, and there is no instant “just add water” formula to thinking. There is no “stick it all in a box and we have it figured out” sort of mentality in classical education. Thinking takes training, and training is what classical education is all about. Training in thinking systematically, clearly, logically, virtuously, but also, ultimately broadly and imaginatively.
By imagination, we don’t mean the nebulous, off the cuff, free association randomness of a mind that never had an education, but the expansive ponderances of possibilities that spring from well-disciplined minds who have feasted on and imitated the great thoughts and ideas of the great minds of human history.
Our aim is thinking, and for that, while boxes are neat containers to sort things into, boxes are also limiting, and there is often more than one way to sort a collection of bric-a-brac. Our aim is to have boxes, but to also teach students to move beyond the boxes.
But back off from imagination for a minute.
A classical education has as its essence the mastery of language, training students to read and understand the thoughts of others, as well as training students to speak and write about those thoughts.
For the early years this looks much like the sort of education that Charlotte Mason advocated: short simple lessons of phonics, copybook, and math. This is the sort of education where you instill a love of learning in your kids by showing them what a marvelous world we live in, what wonders nature presents us with, how grand the words of the Bible are, as well as reading aloud (and alone) book after book after book, revelling in stories, in myths, and in legends
Your formal academic sessions should focus on reading, spelling, copybook, and math. The other subjects such as history, literature, art, PE, and whatever else you may want to pursue with your students should be accomplished in a playful atmosphere of enjoyment, not as tasks that must be accomplished. That playful atmosphere of exploring does much to stretch that early imagination. That imagination will later be key to innovative thinking, to making connections, and to building bridges of communication to others.
Read!! And read some more.